Three Savvy Broads: 028 Fitbit--Kinda

Fitbit--Well, kinda . . .

Fitbit can control your life—if you let it!

So how does a laid-back person deal with this little manipulative gizmo?

To start at the beginning, I bought myself a Fitbit Zip for Christmas. I did have a few misgivings when I saw the commercial in which the Fitbit Flex orders a woman to get moving, but I liked the idea of tracking activity so I purchased the Zip since I did not want to wear something on my wrist. You can put this one in your pocket or wear it attached to your bra, which is what I do.

You can synch the device to your computer or smartphone. If you are obsessive-compulsive about tracking your diet, you can register your weight and your desired weight.

Then for every meal, you log in everything you eat and the dashboard that pops up every time you synch with the device will tell you how many calories you can eat--including if you have eaten too much.

I logged foods for a week.

You can input your sleep habits as well. Some of the other models will track your sleep but the Zip (fortunately) does not.

It will also allow you to track how much water you drink. It does not, however, log Diet Dr. Peppers!

Fitbit has other motivational features. You can communicate with other Fitbit users and challenge each other via Facebook or otherwise. I have not done that either.

Fitbit also awards medals when you reach certain goals. Since I track only walking, I have earned medals just for distances. As you can see, I have received many step badges--lots for 10,000 steps in a day as well as a few 20,000 step badges.

Fitbit takes your sex, weight and height into account to calculate your steps and translate those steps into miles. The Fitbit webpage also tells you how to exactly translate your steps into miles, but I have not done that. The mileage does seem to be fairly accurate. The iceberg badge indicates I have gone past 70 miles. The next distance badge is 250 miles; I don't know why there are no interim ones. Badges seem incidental, not motivational to me! Until I pulled the badge list for the blog, I had no idea how many step badges I had.